ROMANTICISM
AND THE GOTHIC
Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation
MICHAEL GAMER
                                          
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© Michael Gamer 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gamer, Michael.
Romanticism and the Gothic: genre, reception, and canon formation / Michael Gamer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
      
. English literature – th century – History and criticism. . Gothic revival (Literature) –
Great Britain. . English literature – th century – History and criticism. . Wordsworth,
William, –. Lyrical ballads. . Baillie, Joanna, – – Criticism and interpretation.
. Scott, Walter, Sir, – – Criticism and interpretation. . Romanticism –
Great Britain. . Canon (Literature) . Literary form. . Title.
.  
.' – dc -
        hardback
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
A note on the text
page x
xi
xiii
Introduction. Romanticism’s ‘‘pageantry of fear’’

 Gothic, reception, and production

 Gothic and its contexts

 ‘‘Gross and violent stimulants’’: producing Lyrical Ballads
 and 

 National supernaturalism: Joanna Baillie, Germany, and
the gothic drama

 ‘‘To foist thy stale romance’’: Scott, antiquarianism, and
authorship

Notes
Index


ix
 
Gothic, reception, and production
In looking at the Gothic Fiction of the s, it is important to keep
in mind that this was not a strange outcropping of one particular
literary genre, but a form into which a huge variety of cultural
influences, from Shakespeare to ‘Ossian’, from medievalism to
Celtic nationalism, flowed. And one concomitant of this is that
most of the major writers of the period  to  – which is to
say, most of the major poets of that period – were strongly affected
by Gothic in one form or another. And this was not merely a
passive reception of influence: Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron,
and Keats all played a part in shaping the Gothic, in articulating a
set of images of terror which were to exercise a potent influence
(David Punter, The Literature of Terror)1
over later literary history.
At the rare times when literary historians have confronted the question
of romantic poetry’s relation to gothic fiction and drama, they usually
have described it in the language of influence. Though few in number,
scholars since John Beer and Eino Railo have noted late-eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century poets’ fondness for gothic authors and
conventions.2 Recent monographs on the gothic – including studies by
Steven Bruhm, Jeffrey Cox, Judith Halberstam, Kilgour, Miles, José B.
Monleón, David Richter, and Williams – have remarked at least in
passing upon the close thematic and chronological proximities of gothic
fiction and the poetry of the same decades.3 While our understanding of
gothic’s multiple origins and cultural functions has increased as gothic as
a field of study has burgeoned, our understanding of gothic’s historical
and literary position within romanticism has not moved significantly
beyond David Punter’s manifesto of  (quoted above), or even very
far beyond Robert Hume’s assessment of ‘‘Gothic versus Romantic’’ in
:
That Gothicism is closely related to Romanticism is perfectly clear, but it is
easier to state the fact than to prove it tidily and convincingly.4


Romanticism and the gothic
If critics since Punter have begun arguing for a more intimate and active
relation between romantic and gothic writers, they have done so, as
Miles puts it, with ‘‘more theoretically guarded, and aware, approaches.’’5 In most cases, these approaches have built upon the work of
Michel Foucault, Tzvetan Todorov, and Slavoj Zizek in order to argue
for gothic as container of multiple meanings or as mediator between
high art and mass culture. In doing so, they effectively have banished the
traditional Walpole-to-Maturin, – account of gothic, with its
well-demarcated origins and endings. We no longer, for example, describe gothic exclusively as a genre; recent studies have represented it
variously as an aesthetic (Miles), as a great repressed of romanticism
(Bruhm and William Patrick Day), as a poetics (Williams), as a narrative
technique (Halberstam and Punter), or as an expression of changing or
‘‘extreme’’ psychological or socio-political consciousness (Bruhm, Cox,
Halberstam, Monleón, Paulson, Richter, Williams). While these accounts have differed with one another often and on key issues, they
nevertheless have put forward accounts of gothic that pay homage to the
complexity of its materials and to its responsiveness to economic, historical, and technological change.
When we turn to critical accounts of gothic’s relationship to the
poetry, verse tragedies, and metrical romances that we associate with
‘‘romanticism,’’ however, much of this complexity disappears – in part
because the question has not been treated in depth, and in part because
the problem requires reconceptualization. We know, with Punter, that a
relation between these two bodies of writing exists – one not simply of
passive influence but punctuated by simultaneous appropriation and
critique. Romantic writers’ acts of appropriation, moreover, not only
coincide chronologically with their most stringent public criticisms of
gothic, but also show them often borrowing the very metaphors and
techniques they are most critical about elsewhere. What we have, then,
are borrowings that cannot be explained exclusively in terms of influence, whether passive or active, individual or cultural. To borrow Judith
Halberstam’s definition of gothic as ‘‘overdetermined – which is to say,
open to numerous interpretations,’’ the relation of gothic to romantic
ideology is itself a gothic one, since gothic’s presence in romantic writing
is characterized by ‘‘multiple interpretations . . . [of ] multiple modes of
consumption and production, [of ] dangerous consumptions and excessive productivity, and [of ] economies of meaning.’’6 If gothic is, as Miles
puts it, a ‘‘literary complex’’ for ‘‘diverse discourses’’ then the site of
romantic writing’s appropriation of gothic is even more so, since as a
Gothic, reception, and production

literary transaction it is buffeted and pulled apart by historical, economic, and ideological forces in conflict with one another.7
This chapter, therefore, approaches this scene of appropriation from
the twin vantage points of reception and production, and does so to
produce an account of literary exchange sensitive both to the politics of
a Britain at war and to the economics of a burgeoning market publishing industry. In putting forward a framework for understanding the
dynamics of gothic’s reception in the s and s, I begin with the
writings of Hans Robert Jauss, which recently have proven central and
fruitful to David Richter’s work on gothic’s historiography. Because of
the simplicity of Jauss’s model of reception, however, I bring to bear on
it specific notions from M. M. Bakhtin’s later work on speech genres and
from Jon Klancher’s work on reading audiences. The chapter’s final
section, on genre and production, takes as its twin starting points Jauss’s
and Fredric Jameson’s observations on the economics and ideology of
contract theories of genres, and Klancher’s and Miles’s observations on
the heterogeneity that characterizes both reading audiences and generic
practice at the turn of the nineteenth century. I extend these analyses
into the economic realm by asking to what extent gothic functions as a
marketing tool for writers anxious to gain access to popular reading
audiences.

                 ’      
The only recent critic of gothic fiction and drama to make reception the
focus of in-depth study is David Richter, who first addressed the subject
in a  essay entitled, appropriately enough, ‘‘The Reception of the
Gothic Novel in the s.’’ One of the first attempts to define gothic
fiction from a readerly perspective, Richter’s article bases its findings on
the hundreds of reviews, the dozens of letters, and the few sparse reading
diaries that have survived from the era –. Anticipating cultural
studies of gothic published in the s, Richter posits that gothic, and
genre in general, must be reconceived ‘‘as an area of literary space, a
niche in the ecology of literature’’:
But just as living organisms evolve, so do genres. When the cultural environment which produced the niche changes, the genre must change with it . . . It
is my hypothesis that this shifting of literary niches, including the birth of new
genres out of old, cannot be explained in purely formal terms, as the opening
and exhausting of structural possibilities. Such changes must have been
at least partly the result of a complex interaction between producers and

Romanticism and the gothic
consumers, between authors on the one hand and audiences and publishers
on the other.8
Assuming an economic and political basis for generic change, Richter
first calls upon the theoretical work of Hans Robert Jauss, focusing
especially on Jauss’s organization of readers into three strata: () reader/
writers who engage in the textual production; () reader/critics who
influence public taste but who do not directly produce ‘‘creative’’ works
for consumption; and () reader/consumers who comprise the general
market for consumption.9 For Richter, Jauss provides a convenient
starting point because he locates in readers the power to dictate literary
change: ‘‘what makes Jauss worth taking up is not any greater precision
of terminology to influence studies, but rather his implicit notion that
literature changes from the bottom up.’’10 Gothic fiction’s popular
ascent becomes in this account the product of larger and more gradual
changes in the desires of British readers, and gothic’s interest to literary
historians lies in its role as both a symptom and a mediator of that
change: ‘‘[Gothic] sits astride a major shift in the response of readers to
literature, a shift (in Jauss’s terms) from katharsis to aisthesis, or, in basic
English, a shift from reading for information, and for the sake of entry
into a verisimilar world otherwise inaccessible to the reader, toward
reading as an escape.’’11 Richter’s insistence that we read gothic and its
popular reception as part of ‘‘a tendency rather than a revolution’’ leads
him to question more political readings of gothic – particularly those of
critics like Ronald Paulson and Paula Backscheider, who have argued
that gothic’s obsession with tyranny and ‘‘authority . . . gone mad’’
explore the larger-than-life anxieties created in the last years of the
eighteenth century by the recurring madness of George III and by the
French Revolution.12 Such political readings, Richter concludes, are
‘‘attractive but empty’’ because the reviews themselves contradict them:
‘‘Any simplistic notion of the gothic as a metaphor for the French
Revolution runs aground on the ways in which critics during the most
exciting phases of the revolution fail to make such conscious connections.’’13
Part of my project in the next two chapters is to provide a framework
that will describe the reception of gothic fiction, in Richter’s terms, as ‘‘a
complex interaction between producers and consumers.’’ As I will insist,
however, part of this interaction’s complexity is its politics. While
Richter himself only finds one review that links gothic fiction to the
French Revolution, he does not examine the several other publications
Gothic, reception, and production

– among them George Canning’s The Anti-Jacobin; or Weekly Examiner
(–), Thomas Mathias’s The Pursuits of Literature (–), and Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education () – that
vocally condemn the ‘‘morality’’ of gothic fiction and drama as politically dangerous and link it explicitly with radical and revolutionary
politics. These texts help us to understand not only that gothic fiction
and drama were perceived as threats to political and social order, but
also how and why periodical reviewers chose to review gothic texts in
less overtly political terms than more vocally partisan critical cousins like
The Anti-Jacobin. Put another way, it is not enough merely to track
gothic’s reception without contextualizing the receivers themselves,
including the politics of reviewing and the cultural position of the
periodical – and especially the Review – at the end of the eighteenth
century.
In testing his own hypothesis that the rise of gothic fiction in the s
signals a larger shift in British reading practices, Richter finds confirmation of this shift from catharsis to aisthesis in several writers and readers –
the first and third categories of Jauss’s model. In critical essays and
reviews of gothic fiction, however, he finds no such change:
As it happens, the sensibility that I hypothesize grew in the s finds virtually
no expression in these publications . . . all of them alike tend to discuss the novel
in neoclassical or Johnsonian terms, with an emphasis on the probability,
generality and ethical probity of the narrative. This is a blow to my hypothesis.14
This marked opposition between critical and popular tastes is crucial to
understanding the processes of gothic’s stigmatization in the s.
Gothic’s reception becomes especially marked and voluble after ,15
and coincides in trajectory and intensity with widespread alarm in
England during these years over unrest at home and possible invasion
from across the Channel. In this context, however, I do not see the
opposition of popular and critical tastes to be a blow to Richter’s
argument. If his hypotheses about changes in British reading habits are
at all credible, I do not see how there could not exist discernible
opposition and resistance to the most apparent marker of this change –
the sudden and at times overwhelming popularity of gothic fiction and
drama – particularly in such a time of general anxiety and alarm.16 For
those segments of the population threatened by it, cultural change is
more than merely upsetting and unsettling. Cultural trends, then, not
only spread unevenly across a culture as Richter ultimately concludes,
but also frequently provoke significant resistances at specific sites. Such

Romanticism and the gothic
a narrative seems to me particularly plausible in the case of the reception of the gothic, whose reviewers and critics occupy markedly different
positions of cultural authority and gender than do its producers and
consumers.
Even Jauss’s model of readership, which bears little resemblance to
what evidence does exist concerning actual British readership, comes to
bear in fruitful ways on the question of gothic’s reception and its position
in romantic poetry. As Jon Klancher has argued persuasively, reviewers
and readers hardly constituted homogeneous, let alone mutually exclusive, groups.17 Yet the relevance of Jauss’s strata does not lie in the
accuracy with which they represent actual British readers or reading
habits, but rather in the uncanny resemblance those conceptual categories bear to the similarly imprecise ideas that late-eighteenth-century
British writers and reviewers held about the makeup of their own
readership.18
This imprecise knowledge of fellow readers has been confirmed in
recent scholarly research on literacy and reading habits at the end of the
eighteenth century – research that has characterized British culture as
experiencing exploding literacy rates accompanied by an increasingly
bewildering and diverse collection of reading audiences.19 Few conservative prose writers in the s, for example, display an informed
awareness of this new diversity of readership beyond making increasingly anxious calls to police the reading of women and adolescents and to
contain the circulation of radical texts like The Rights of Man (). For
Ina Ferris, this paternalistic response, with its voice of aristocratic
authority, ‘‘testifies to the pressure exerted on the literary sphere by the
extension of literacy.’’20 Klancher, in fact, makes this irony – of a print
culture whose diverse producers and consumers must struggle to comprehend changes that in many ways they themselves have produced – a
defining characteristic of these years: ‘‘The English Romantics were the
first to become radically uncertain of their readers . . . No single, unified
‘reading public’ could be addressed in such times.’’21 This more general
radical uncertainty, not surprisingly, becomes anxious incomprehension when confronted by the runaway popularity of gothic fiction and
drama after the French Revolution. One of the factors that makes the
sudden popularity of gothic so upsetting is that it makes manifest the
vast quantity of popular romance readers ‘‘out there’’ in British culture
– readers who become threatening to reviewers, literati, clergy, and
government officials only when their numbers are perceived, and their
ability to affect British taste and morals imagined and computed.
Gothic, reception, and production

The process by which the array of readers who produce, review, and
read gothic texts become mistakenly separated into these strata is captured most vividly in those figures who inhabit, either at various points
in their careers or simultaneously, all three Jaussian positions of gothic
writer, gothic reviewer, and gothic reader. The ability of these writers to
occupy categories of readership that are, in many ways, at odds with one
another changes as little between  and  as do the categories
themselves. Mary Wollstonecraft’s contempt for ‘‘the herd of novelists’’
in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (), for example, is as well
documented as her predilection for gothicism and sensibility in her own
fiction.22 Like Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes negative
reviews of gothic fiction by Radcliffe, Robinson, and Lewis at the same
time () that he is composing his Osorio, ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner,’’ ‘‘Christabel,’’ and ‘‘Kubla Khan.’’23 Coleridge occupies
these conflicting categories of readership, furthermore, with an energy
and ease that in no way abates over the next two decades. His Friend
(–) and Biographia Literaria () attack Lewis and Maturin, respectively, in the same vitriolic terms as his earlier reviews of gothic
fiction, and make a point of attacking not only these individual authors
but also their ‘‘imitators’’ as pernicious; yet these same years see the
Drury Lane production of Remorse () and the publication of Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep ().
In many ways the barometer of popular taste in the period, Walter
Scott writes in an array of genres whose diversity is only less striking
than the precision with which he assumes the voice of ballad-singer,
dramatist, antiquarian editor, minstrel, historian, reviewer, folklorist,
lyric poet, romancer, and historical novelist. Translator of Stürm und
Drang works and of Bürger’s supernatural ballads, writer of his own
‘‘Germanised’’24 gothic dramas, and contributor to Lewis’s Tales of
Wonder (), he nevertheless moves from producing texts that celebrate
black magic and the supernatural to debunking these same subjects in
his critical writing – doing so with cool rationality in Letters on Demonology
and Witchcraft () and with conventional hyperbole in his  Quarterly review of Charles Maturin’s The Fatal Revenge: Or, The Family of
Montorio, A Romance ().25 The language of this latter review, furthermore, becomes particularly interesting when we consider that Scott had
recently published two ‘‘tales’’ with similarly dark and supernaturally
haunted heroes: The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion ().
Scott’s lengthy review opens by stating that he has heard various
female ‘‘whispers’’ gossiping about the Quarterly ‘‘that we were dull . . .

Romanticism and the gothic
– that is, we had none of those light and airy articles which a young lady
might read while her hair was papering’’ (SMP, :). With this
gambit, Scott creates a scenario in which he, a mature and sensible man
of letters, must order and attempt to read ‘‘the newest and most
fashionable novels’’ in order to gratify the demands of young female
readers (SMP, :). When Scott receives his ‘‘packet, or rather
hamper’’ of books, the epic project of his review essay comes into full
focus: not to review a single novel, but rather to make sense of the
‘‘present degradation of this class of compositions’’ by defining them
generically and placing them into an evaluative and gendered hierarchy
(SMP, :):
When we had removed from the surface of our hamper a few thin volumes of
simple and insipid sentiment . . . we lighted upon . . . the lowest denizens of
Grub-street narrating, under the flimsy veil of false names, and through the
medium of a fictitious tale, all that malevolence can invent and stupidity
propagate concerning private misfortune and personal characters . . .
‘‘Plunging from depth to depth a vast profound,’’ we at length imagined
ourselves arrived at the Limbus Patrum in good earnest. The imitators of Mrs.
Radcliffe and Mr. Lewis were before us; personages, who to all the faults and
extravagancies of their originals, added that of dulness.26 (SMP, :–)
Scott’s Dantesque descent to that lowest circle of literary hell – gothic
fiction – shows him participating unproblematically within the conventions of periodical reviewing, whose task he sees as one of confirming
existing literary hierarchies and enforcing unchanging standards of
taste. That Scott had been stung two years earlier by Francis Jeffrey in a
review of Marmion for appealing to female readers by employing ‘‘the
machinery of a bad German novel . . . images borrowed from the novels
of Mrs. Ratcliffe [sic] and her imitators’’27 in no way stops him from
assuming the same voice in his own review, associating Maturin’s novel
with the same readership, and calling for him to adopt the same
standards of good sense, simplicity, and restraint associated with masculine writing.
Thus, in spite of a burgeoning readership and a literary marketplace
in which numerous men and women often read, write, and review
gothic simultaneously, the discourses that make up the reception of
gothic fiction and drama configure gothic readers, writers, and reviewers as wholly separate entities, suggesting that in the s perceptions of British readership change more slowly than the constitution of
the readership itself. This factor begins to explain not only why Reviews
maintain ‘‘Johnsonian’’ assumptions, but also why the categories of
Gothic, reception, and production

writer, reviewer, and reader continue in literary discourse to endure as
mutually exclusive categories both in reviews and in authors’ prefaces of
gothic texts.
The ‘‘Apostrophe to the Critics’’ that opens Charlotte Dacre’s Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (), for example, is typical for its depiction of
critics as unknowable, overzealous, and uncomprehending: ‘‘I confess I
stand in awe of the critics, for I am diffident of myself – I fear they will
lash the effervescence of its sentiments, and the enthusiasm of its fancy;
but let them remember, I write not to palliate either, but to exemplify
their fatal tendency.’’28 Dacre’s argument, however self-effacing, nevertheless carries with it a double edge repeated constantly by other writers
of gothic fiction in the period – that critics, however awe-inspiring and
sublime to the gothic writer in their incomprehensibility and obscurity,
are also incapable of comprehending the immediate pleasures and
functions of the gothic. Claiming an essential difference between herself
and ‘‘the critics,’’ Dacre argues that this difference bars her from
condemnation, since reviewers should not condemn what they are too
old, too masculine, and too learned to understand: ‘‘the effervescence of
its sentiments, and the enthusiasm of its fancy.’’ The only extant review
of Dacre’s first work of fiction, in turn, addresses her romance with a
curt paternalism reminiscent of Scott’s tone toward his female readers of
‘‘light and airy’’ gothic fiction, commending its ‘‘moral’’ because it
cautions young women against ‘‘mischief’’ and toward ‘‘social duties.’’29
Its tone not only acknowledges the essential difference between gothic
writer and gothic reviewer by standing in stark contrast to Dacre’s own
tone, but also exemplifies typical assumptions about gender and age
inscribed in the categories of ‘‘gothic reviewer,’’ ‘‘gothic reader,’’ and
‘‘gothic writer.’’
Of these three categories, the first two of these (gothic reviewer and
gothic reader) are especially fixed in opposition to one another at the
turn of the nineteenth century. The gothic writer, while perceived
overwhelmingly as a female figure writing for young women, nevertheless carries some class and gender instability because its ranks include,
much to the chagrin of its contemporary critics, antiquarians and men
of taste like Horace Walpole and William Beckford, who have ‘‘wasted’’
their genius by writing in the genre. As chapter  will show, this gender
ambiguity – femininity blurred by what eighteenth-century reviewers
termed a flamboyant, ‘‘wanton’’ masculinity – is itself a legacy of
romance’s cultural status in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gothic reviewers, on the other hand, speak from far more predict-

Romanticism and the gothic
able positions – as emblematic and experienced Men of Letters whose
time is wasted by women who write, and especially women who read,
fiction:
That the majority of novels merit our contempt, is but too true; and, for the
above given, it is a truth of a serious and painful nature. The very end of a novel
is to produce interest in the reader, for the characters of whom he reads: – but,
in order to produce this interest, it is necessary that the novel writer should be
well acquainted with the human heart, should minutely understand its motives,
and should possess the art, without being either tedious or trifling, of minutely
bringing them into view. This art is so little understood by the young ladies who
at present write novels, which none but young ladies and we, luckless reviewers,
read, that it is not wonderful that they should have incurred a considerable
share of neglect from us.30
For the above Monthly reviewer, a piece of fiction can only claim success,
and therefore a legitimate reason for existing, if it can demonstrate
extensive and productive knowledge of human nature. As the reviewer’s
pronouncements upon the novel and upon young female writers and
readers suggest, such knowledge resides typically in a mature, experienced, and, in most cases, masculine mind much like the reviewer’s.
Jauss’s reader–reviewer–writer model, then, adopts itself surprisingly
well to the reception of gothic fiction and drama in the s and s –
not because it accurately represents British readership in these years,
but because it coincides with how British readers perceived and represented themselves. Just as one notices, when reading early reviews of The
Monk and other novels like it, how cursorily reviewers read (and misread)
actual gothic texts even as they dismiss the genre as a whole, so one also
realizes with increasing certainty that the categories of gothic writer,
gothic reviewer, and gothic reader matter as much as the actual demographics of gothic’s readership. One need only look, for example, at a
case like Elizabeth Moody’s anonymous review of James Thomson’s The
Denial; or, The Happy Retreat () to gain a sense of how the gender and
class inflections associated with these three gothic strata invade and often
take over the act of reviewing:
Of the various species of composition that in course come before us, there are
none in which our writers of the male sex have less excelled, since the days of
Richardson and Fielding, than in the arrangement of a novel. Ladies seem to
appropriate to themselves an exclusive privilege in this kind of writing; witness
the numerous productions of romantic tales to which female authors have given
birth. The portraiture of the tender passions, the delicacy of sentiment, and the
easy flow of style, may, perhaps, be most adapted to the genius of the softer sex:
Gothic, reception, and production

but however that may be, politeness, certainly, will not suffer us to dispute this
palm with our fair competitors. We, though of the harder sex, as men, and of
the still harder race as critics, are no enemies to an affecting well-told story: but as
we are known not to be very easily pleased, it may be imagined that those
performances only will obtain the sanction of our applause, which can stand the
test of certain criteria for excellence.31
The review is particularly breathtaking for the directness with which it
defines and insists upon the specific gender and class inflections attached
to the occupations of reviewing and novel-writing. What begins as a
potentially negative review written by a woman of a romance written by
a man quickly becomes something fundamentally different and more
traditional: a self-identified ‘‘male’’ reviewer denying the value of popular fiction written by ‘‘Ladies’’ by asserting ‘‘certain [and in this case
overtly masculine] criteria for excellence.’’ The only thing more striking
than Moody’s representation of herself as a member first of ‘‘the harder
sex’’ and then of ‘‘the still harder race as critics’’ is the way that Thomson’s
sex carries less significance than The Denial’s gender. What matters here,
then, are not Moody’s and Thomson’s sexes, but rather the respective
gender and class positions of the cultural categories in which they
participate. Almost automatically, Moody aligns herself with the ultramasculinity of eighteenth-century literary reviewing, ‘‘hard[ening]’’
herself as she aligns Thompson with ‘‘the softer sex,’’ thereby claiming
the very mantle of masculine ‘‘excellence’’ and taste that she denies him.
In performing this double act of realignment, moreover, she provides
a prototypical example of both the pervasiveness and the power of these
Jaussian readerly strata at the end of the eighteenth century. If taking on
the masculine garb of the reviewer is to authorize and authenticate
oneself, then part of that process of authorization involves defining
oneself not only within the category of reviewer but also in opposition to
other categories. It is not enough that we understand why Moody must
change her own sex to that of ‘‘the still harder’’ critic; we also must
understand that part of her process of self-definition involves that of
completing the reviewer–writer dichotomy by feminizing The Denial’s
author. In other words, it is not enough for a male reviewer to oppose a
male writer of popular fiction; the gender of the writer being reviewed
must be transformed through association with the ‘‘female writers’’ who
supposedly dominate both the reading and the writing of popular
fiction. If gothic readers, gothic writers, and gothic reviewers are specific
categories that do not reflect the demographic makeup of late-eighteenth-century British readership yet dominate gothic’s reception, then

Romanticism and the gothic
we must begin to ask what function these categories serve, why they take
on an increasingly oppositional relation to one another as the s
progress, and how they shaped the practices of late-eighteenth- and
early-nineteenth-century writers attracted to the gothic.

           
My purpose in providing the above examples is to stress the extent to
which we are confronting, in the reception of gothic, positions already
hardened during the course of the eighteenth century. Gothic’s reception is part of a strong and longstanding grid of preconception and
reification – one that finds its origins in the history of the reception of
prose romance, and that structures the assumptions and terminology of
readerly responses to gothic. Consequently, I have described gothic’s
reception both as a series of exchanges between individuals or actual
groups of readers, and as a highly conventional set of exchanges between readerly categories. It is this fixedness of the categories of gothic
writer, reader, and reviewer, I contend, that primarily shapes gothic
writer–reviewer discourses, and produces such succinct dismissals as
Clara Reeve’s of ‘‘doughty critics’’ or the Monthly Review’s of Ann
Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (): ‘‘To those who are
delighted with the marvellous, whom wonders, and wonders only, can
charm, the present production will afford a considerable degree of
amusement. This kind of entertainment, however, can be little relished
but by a young and unformed mind.’’32 The frequency with which such
caricatures recur, furthermore, confirms that we must consider gothic’s
reception as occurring among sectors of the British readership that,
however much they might actually overlap with one another, define
themselves oppositionally as separate and distinct from other sectors. In
Jon Klancher’s words, gothic writers, reviewers, and readers ‘‘are not
simply distinct sectors of the cultural sphere. They are mutually produced as an otherness within [each’s] discourse.’’33
Our sense of the dynamics of this standoff is somewhat limited by the
scant direct knowledge we have about actual readers of gothic fiction
and drama – what Richter calls ‘‘the real-life counterparts of [Northanger
Abbey’s] Catherine Morland.’’34 This paucity of evidence – of published
or unpublished records or diaries of gothic readers – has allowed critical
writers and satirists to assume that gothic readers were, like Catherine
Morland, young, female, naive, and easily manipulated. One could go
so far as to argue that no single literary stereotype has enjoyed such
Gothic, reception, and production

widespread acceptance on so little first-hand information. The little
evidence that does exist, moreover, pointedly contradicts the portrait of
gothic readers drawn by critics and historians for over two centuries.
Analyzing the borrowing records of proprietary libraries and the
catalogs of circulating libraries, Paul Kaufman has found British libraries to be dominated neither by women nor by gothic and sentimental
fiction.35 Jan Fergus, in her seminal work on circulating libraries, not
only has corroborated most of Kaufman’s findings, but also suggested
that borrowing fiction was neither a female nor a middle-class enterprise:
The information in Samuel Clay’s buying and borrowing records, then, makes
it necessary to modify five out of six clichés about the eighteenth-century
provincial reading public . . . first, that the circulating library of this time does
not seem to have greatly expanded provincial readership. Nor did women
constitute the overwhelming majority of patrons in this provincial library; in
fact, men and women displayed about equal interest in borrowing books.
Novels did form the most popular genre in this library – the one received idea
about readership that Clay’s records support. But the notion that women in
particular borrowed novels exclusively and voraciously is inaccurate. Neither
sex borrowed novels exclusively, and only one reader, [a butcher named]
Latimer, borrowed them voraciously . . . Finally, and most important, neither
Clay’s bookselling activities nor even his library indicates that the middle class
had come to dominate the reading public.36
Looking again to Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland, then, we see
Austen exploring this same gap between predominant stereotypes of
gothic readers and actual readers of gothic fiction, for no one is more
convinced of the truth of the category ‘‘gothic reader’’ than Catherine:
‘‘I never look at [Beechen Cliff],’’ said Catherine, ‘‘without thinking of the
south of France.’’
‘‘You have been abroad then?’’ said Henry, a little surprised.
‘‘Oh! no, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of
the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in the ‘Mysteries of
Udolpho.’ But you never read novels, I dare say?’’
‘‘Why not?’’
‘‘Because they are not clever enough for you – gentlemen read better books.’’
‘‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel,
must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of
them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it,
I could not lay down again; – I remember finishing it in two days – my hair
standing on end the whole time.’’ . . .
‘‘But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly.’’

Romanticism and the gothic
‘‘It is amazingly; it may well suggest amazement if they do – for they read nearly
as many as women.’’37
Both Fergus’s and Kaufman’s findings concerning the readership of
fiction suggest statistically about gothic readers what Austen’s Henry
Tilney here embodies: that men ‘‘read nearly as many as women,’’ and
that gothic fiction attracted educated and elite readers capable not only
of understanding irony but also of treating their own reading experience
with it. For Austen, as for Kaufman and Fergus, the actual gothic reader
has little in common with the ‘‘young ladies and . . . luckless reviewers’’
assumed by the Monthly and other Reviews to be the only readers of
gothic fiction. That Austen raises and explodes this assumption about
the gender and level of education of gothic readers twice in the same
passage provides us with some sense of the prevalence of the stereotype
and degree of irritation it caused her. Looking to Northanger’s famous
passage defending novels, furthermore, the perpetuators of such a
stereotype are equally clear: ‘‘Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse
such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk
in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans.’’38
These ‘‘threadbare strains’’ of ‘‘abuse,’’ and the effects that they had
on other writers in the period, require further investigation and theoretical work. In writing prose fiction, Austen has little choice but to defend
the novel against reviewers and to supplement their portrait of the naive
female gothic reader (Catherine) with an older and more sophisticated
counterpart (Henry). For a poet, dramatist, or learned editor, however,
such a direct defense of – and association with – popular fiction is both
unnecessary and, in the face of the repetitive vitriol and clichés of
eighteenth-century reviewing, undesirable. By the end of the eighteenth
century, in fact, gothic reviewer–writer discourses have become so
hyperbolic and so mechanistically conventional as to force us to reexamine their cultural function. Gothic writers and reviewers may
ostentatiously speak to one another, but the utter sameness of their
mutual addresses spurs us to ask for whom these authorial prefaces and
critical reviews are intended, and where, if anywhere, communication
exists in these discourses. Put another way, in discourses so predictable
in their rhetoric and modes of address, why do gothic writers and
reviewers write with so much energy?
How long, O Novelist! wilt thou abuse our patience? How long wilt thou continue
to persecute us by the publication of ‘‘Nothings,’’ and those too in ‘‘so strange a
style’’ – So nonsensically, so stupidly written, that even Laughter is unable to
Gothic, reception, and production

exercise his functions on them. – How long, we say, wilt thou continue this? –
Why wilt thou put us under the disagreeable necessity of seizing the whip? – of
lashing thee –
– ‘‘Naked thro’ the world:
Even from the East to the West.’’39
For these reasons, gothic reviewer–writer discourses at the end of the
eighteenth century hardly can be called ‘‘dialogic’’ in the manner in
which scholars usually invoke the term.40 They instead present us, in the
language of Bakhtin’s later work on speech genres, with speakers who
claim to speak to one another yet speak past one another: a series of
addresses by addressers without addressees made up of apparently
meaningless utterances.41 Partisan in their fixed tones and stances, these
discourses either must verge on becoming functionless babble or must
achieve their primary communication elsewhere – i.e., with other sectors of the British readership.
Understanding this dynamic – of speaking to one group while actually communicating with another – allows us to move beyond imagining
gothic’s reception in the s as simply an impasse between stubborn
and unthinking participants. It allows us, in fact, to view stubbornness as
a writerly strategy and impasses as serving economic and political
functions. Gothic writers may remonstrate with reviewers directly, but
such remonstrations function even more potently as appeals to bookbuyers and book-borrowers, particularly when writers are able to position themselves in opposition to a supposedly older and masculine
critical audience and (either directly or indirectly) in alignment with the
female and younger readers who stereotypically comprise the bulk of
gothic’s readership. Within this model of writer–reviewer discourse,
Jane Austen’s defense of novel-reading in Northanger Abbey is only atypical
in the openness of its use of economic language, and in the degree of
irony and sophistication with which it wields the notion of ‘‘patron[age]’’:
Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another,
from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us
leave it to the Reviewers to abuse . . . every new novel . . . Let us not desert one
another; we are an injured body.42
Gothic reviewers, in speaking past the gothic writers whom they address, engage in similar practices. As the example of Moody typifies,
part of this strategy ‘‘to abuse . . . every new novel’’ involves selfauthorization and self-definition. As guardians of taste in a culture that

Romanticism and the gothic
privileges male over female writers, poetry over prose, and learned and
didactic over popular literature, reviewers dismiss gothic writing almost
by definition, since to countenance it is to undermine the very positions
of privilege from which they derive their authority.
I wish to argue, however, that the ritualistic abuse of gothic writers by
gothic reviewers involves more explicit acts of intimidation as well.
Gothic reviewers most often attack individual gothic works, and gothic
as a genre, not to remonstrate with gothic writers to write in other
genres, but rather to make clear to other readers – and especially to
other writers – the cultural costs of reading and writing gothic texts.
However indirectly stated, this communication constitutes a palpable
threat, and if gothic reviewers perform a specific kind of cultural work, it
is to define and reiterate the risks of reading and writing gothic to those
members of the British readership contemplating it. Looking back to the
above-quoted review of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, for example,
gothic readers risk associating themselves with the ‘‘unformed mind[s]’’
of adolescents, with the ‘‘stupidity’’ of female ‘‘nonsense,’’ and with the
vitiated tastes of readers for whom ‘‘wonders, and wonders only, can
charm.’’ More seriously, gothic writers risk losing their cultural legitimacy, social respectability, and standing as serious authors. I read
gothic’s critical reception, therefore, as a regulatory discourse – carried
out under the fiction of paternalistic advice to a given gothic writer, but
functioning as an implicit threat to other readers and writers potentially
attracted to the gothic.

                  
Once you begin to examine the historical development and empowerment of any particular system, what you discover is a
collection of accidental contingencies that have been turned into
opportunities.
(Marlon Ross, ‘‘Contingent Predilections’’)43
If reception confers genre and hence cultural status upon texts, this does
not mean that genre is any less central to textual production – as writerly
practice, publishing strategy, or political opportunity. Genre may depend in part upon reception, but the claims that writers make for their
texts, and the decisions that publishers make concerning how to package
and promote those texts, fundamentally matter to how genres develop
and to how texts interact within cultures. They matter to modern critics
and historians, moreover, for what they suggest about a text’s intended
audience, expected stature, and anticipated sites of political resistance.
Gothic, reception, and production

Because writers and publishers attempt to frame reception, strategies of
textual packaging can tell us much about the anxieties and hopes that
have shaped that text’s composition, production, and distribution.
In beginning here, I am hardly espousing original ideas; even the
most traditional notions of genre have assumed it to be a mediating tool
between writers and their various publics, whether that tool be E. D.
Hirsch’s ‘‘heuristic device’’ () or Cyril Birch’s ‘‘comfortable saddle’’
().44 Similar formulations have occurred in studies as widely varied
as Philippe Lejeune’s On Autobiography (), which takes as its fundamental assumption the idea of genre as a pact between writer and
reader,45 and Fredric Jameson’s foundational The Political Unconscious
(), which makes as one of its central projects that of historicizing
genre’s contractual ‘‘pact’’ until its ideological moorings are exposed:
The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of
immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic
perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life . . . Genres are
essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific
public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural
artifact.46
For Jameson, genre is inextricably tied to notions of institutionally
sanctioned propriety, and is therefore ‘‘a form of social praxis, . . . a
symbolic resolution to a concrete historical situation.’’47 Such a formulation sees popular genre not only as tapping into widespread readerly
desire, but also as possessing the power to placate cultural anxieties and
displace them into the realm of fantasy.48 Taken to its logical conclusion, it produces arguments similar to those of Jauss and McGann –
that the conventionality of texts and the popularity of genres are
measures of the degree to which a text eludes its own historicity. Jauss, in
fact, nearly collapses the conventional into the ahistorical: ‘‘The more
stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic
character and its degree of historicity . . . [Genres] transform themselves
to the extent that they have history, and they have history to the extent
that they transform themselves.’’49
In associating ideology with the infiltration and institutionalization of
market economics, Jauss and Jameson largely duplicate Raymond Williams’s identification of ideology with processes that produce politically
interested meanings for culturally dominant groups.50 They therefore
construct, either self-consciously or on the level of assumption, models

Romanticism and the gothic
in which texts ‘‘fall’’ to the extent that they are institutionally coopted by
established genres. In their respective hierarchies, texts descend yet
further into cliché and cultural irrelevance if participation includes the
economic cooptation by the popular press:
It is . . . the generic contract and institution itself, which, along with so many
other institutions and traditional practices, falls casualty to the gradual penetration of a market system and a money economy. With the elimination of an
institutionalized social status for the cultural producer and the opening of the
work of art itself to commodification, the older generic specifications are
transformed into a brand-name system against which any authentic artistic
expression must necessarily struggle. The older generic categories do not, for all
that, die out, but persist in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture,
transformed into the drugstore and airport paperback lines of gothics, mysteries, romances, bestsellers, and popular biographies.51
In the above formulation, genres rarely ‘‘die out’’ because, as they
become more institutionalized, they simply change their position within
the cultural systems they occupy, or feed and disperse themselves into
other forms. With cultural institutionalization comes increasing economic institutionalization and distribution, where the genre is recognized
as a commodity and therefore produced for consumption. Appropriately Blakean in his vision of genres that fall into a ‘‘half-life’’ and are
kept alive to work in the hellish mills of mass culture and airportand drugstore-level commodification, Jameson re-enacts a distinctly
romantic trope describing the fragmentary process of commodification
as political and cultural tragedy. Politically resistant discourse, like the
prototypical romantic artist, must ‘‘struggle’’ against conventionality
because conventions always carry with them the impurities of the
institutions that established them. While by no means nostalgic for the
past, Jameson sees commodification as both tragic and inevitable because of its intellectual bankruptcy and its power to reproduce itself with
mindless efficiency. As genres fall ‘‘casualty to the gradual penetration of
a market system,’’ their ‘‘ideologemes’’ increasingly, but never completely, reflect or refer to that market economy.
I would like to apply these two assertions – of genres as essentially
ideological, and of generic institutionalization as inevitably economic –
to explain the stubborn distance between gothic readers and reviewers
at the end of the eighteenth century, and to formulate a model that will
describe gothic’s behavior in the s and s as an economic entity
within British market publishing. I do so primarily because the way that
gothic conventions find their way into ‘‘high’’ literary discourse at the
Gothic, reception, and production

turn of the nineteenth century is not adequately represented by
Jameson’s narrative, even though its presiding logic – of commodification necessitating a fall from ‘‘high’’ to ‘‘low’’ culture – governs the
terms by which the borders between high and low are patrolled.
First, however, I want to explain why I hesitate to reduce, as Jameson
does, genres to ‘‘essences,’’ and ultimately to ideologemes. To reduce a
genre to an ideological function fails to explain why genres are so often
appropriated for purposes other than hegemonic ones, and why genres
so frequently fragment and feed other forms. At the very least, it denies
the role that generic inversion, parody, burlesque, and montage – to
name just a few highly conventional strategies – play in instituting
historical change and in binding literary and political discourses to one
another. More importantly, it fails to acknowledge, as Katie Trumpener
has asserted recently, that genres develop over time dialectically
through their interactions with other kinds of writing, as ‘‘names,
characters, set pieces, and plots are constantly borrowed back and forth
between genres, even among writers of sharply divergent political views
who claim to disapprove of each other’s work.’’52
By asserting this, I by no means wish to deny gothic’s ideological
importance to British readers or its participation in the production of
dominant beliefs in the decades that followed the French Revolution. In
associating the Napoleonic Wars with the rise and fall of gothic’s
popularity, scholars have long maintained that gothic fiction and drama
performed important cultural work in these years by allowing British
readers to satisfy private desires and anxieties while participating in
collective narrative fantasy. The majority of these conventions James
Watt suggestively groups under the rubric ‘‘loyalist gothic romance’’;
it is remarkable, however, how many of these same devices appear in
what Watt calls ‘‘subversive’’ gothic texts as well.53 Gothic’s nostalgia
for simpler and more hierarchical class and gender structures, its
fabling about the birth of the British nation, its xenophobia and antiCatholicism, and its fondness for continental travel (not possible during
the war years) all smack of the ideology of popular wartime fantasy. This
critical narrative, however, hardly exhausts or fully explains the multitude of divergent and often conflicting political roles gothic plays in
these years. It addresses, for example, neither how gothic can accommodate radically different political viewpoints even as it is denounced as
politically dangerous, nor how it can function as a vehicle for British
nationalism even as it is rejected as an invading foreign literature. I find
gothic’s ideological flexibility – striking given the general monotony of

Romanticism and the gothic
critical responses to it – to be eloquent testimony that market economies
rarely operate with perfect ideological efficiency to the point of completely excluding outside discourses, even when supported by state
censorship. At the very least, gothic’s vexed reception in the censorious
s, ranging as it does between commercial success and critical
condemnation, should alert us to its ability to produce multiple significations, and to fulfill multiple functions within the late-eighteenth-century
literary marketplace.
Part of gothic’s instability, of course, is endemic to any text, be it a
material book or the collection of social conventions that comprise a
genre. Derrida’s famous passage from ‘‘The Law of Genre,’’ quoted as
an epigraph for this book’s Introduction, puts this with famous succinctness: ‘‘Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no
genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation
never amounts to belonging.’’54 If texts never fully ‘‘belong’’ to a genre –
and chapter  will attempt to demonstrate otherwise – part of this
chapter’s project has been to describe the ways in which genre nonetheless infringes upon texts through critical and economic reception. Texts
both bring to bear and have borne upon them multiple genres. If
Derrida’s formulation by itself is incomplete for our purposes because it
does not attempt to theorize how texts operate economically and politically within romantic period culture, then we must supplement it
accordingly.
One need only look to the ‘‘Prolegomenon’’ of Stuart Curran’s Poetic
Form and British Romanticism () – with its listing of lyrical dramas,
lyrical ballads, historical novels, and modern eclogues – to register the
penchant for formal and generic experimentation at the turn of the
nineteenth century. Most explanations of this proclivity, furthermore,
have leant toward the contextual, connecting it to the intense political
changes wrought by the French Revolution, to larger political and
economic changes within British culture, or, like Jon Klancher, to some
combination of the two: ‘‘the intense cultural politics of the romantic
period obliged writers not only to distinguish among conflicting audiences, but to do so by elaborating new relations between the individual
reader and the collective audience.’’55 Political divisions in the romantic
period, it seems, not only produce divisions among reading audiences,
but also force writers to renegotiate the writer–reader pact by writing for
multiple and often conflicting audiences simultaneously.
Consequently, if Bakhtin is even partially correct in arguing that
every genre choice presupposes an audience choice, then genre in the
Gothic, reception, and production

romantic period increasingly becomes a way not only of targeting a
particular audience but also of potentially negotiating between audiences,
as writers demarcate their texts with multiple genres in order to propose
pacts with multiple audiences. This hardly means, nor do I mean to
suggest, that every generic or discursive shift within a text or between
texts signals a shift in audience, nor does it account for all of the ways
that texts cite, sample, and allude to one another. It does mean,
however, that genre can become a means of reaching particular audiences, whether comprised of ‘‘real’’ readers or imagined strata. By invoking
gothic or any genre, writers and publishers can mark a text with genre
and thereby attempt to place that text into a chosen position in the
contemporary literary landscape. It becomes, in short, a way for authors
to market texts to imagined audiences.56
In foregrounding the economic and cultural processes that govern
gothic’s transmission into other cultural forms and practices, then, I
have asked in this chapter, perhaps counterintuitively, to what degree
generic production imagines and even defines reading audiences, and
how audience reception can define generic identity and determine
cultural status. Part of the project of chapter , therefore, will be to
locate these questions within the history of gothic’s formation and
reception and the various contexts that informed it. Such an approach, I
hope, will provide more than just a picture of writers negotiating
between the conflicting demands of various audiences. It will grant us
access to the economic, political, and aesthetic considerations that
confront all writers and that are inherent in any act of textual production. More pointedly, it will present us with emblematic situations in
which writers must gesture to audiences that define themselves in
opposition to one another, and thereby risk becoming self-divided,
duplicitous, uncertain, and dialectic.